Company URL: https://www.berkleytechnologyservices.com/ 

Berkley Technology Services (BTS) is the dynamic technology solution for W. R. Berkley Corporation, a Fortune 500 Commercial Lines Insurance Company. With key locations in Urbandale, IA and Wilmington, DE, BTS provides innovative and customer-focused IT solutions to the majority of WRBC’s 60+ operating units across the globe. BTS’s wide reach ensures that ideas and opinions are considered at every level of the organization to guarantee we find the best solutions possible.  

Driven by a commitment to collaboration, BTS acts as consultants to our customers and Operating Units by providing comprehensive solutions that not only address the challenge at hand, but proactively plan for the “What’s Next” in our industry and beyond.  

With a culture centered on innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, BTS stands as a community of technology leaders with eyes toward the future -- leaders who truly care about growing not only their team members, but themselves, and take pride in their employees who shine. BTS offers endless ways to get involved and have the chance to grow your career into a wide range of roles you'd never known existed. Come join us as we push forward into the future of industry leading technological solutions.  

Berkley Technology Services: Right Team, Right Technology, Simple and Secure.  

The Director, DevOps provides leadership to help guide the enterprise through its public cloud transformation initiatives, including CICD pipeline creation and management, Kubernetes administration, establishing robust security practices, and migrating on-premises applications, tools, and capabilities.  They bring knowledge of single, hybrid, and multi-cloud operations, cost modeling, scalability, security, sandboxing, containerization, elastic computing, and high-availability solutions to assist in designing, building, and implementing the next generation of systems here at WRBC.

This role collaborates with internal business and technical stakeholders to partner on migration activities and new development within the public cloud environment.  They are responsible for assessing application and organization maturity and readiness for working within the public cloud and working with teams to close technical and personnel gaps.  The Director, DevOps establishes technical standards and patterns, creates tools and automated workflow capabilities, and builds cloud ecosystems that foster a high-degree of innovation and enablement.

This person will also be responsible for the day-to-day leadership and management of a DevOps Engineering team, including recruiting, training, mentoring, and performance management.

Technical Strategy

• Own and drive overall 1-3-year enterprise cloud strategy, including technology investment and lifecycle goals.
• Collaborate with key stakeholders, including Enterprise Architecture, Infrastructure, and Information Security teams to create and validate the strategy.
• Maintain contact with vendors, industry peers, and professional associations to keep informed of existing and emerging industry trends, standards, and technologies.

Leadership

• Partner with business leaders and organizational stakeholders who seek actionable recommendations to make investment decisions about cloud technology and their readiness to embrace it.
• Provide day-to-day leadership and management of the Cloud Services DevOps Engineering team and position it to become an internal resource, offering services and skills to support the development and execution of business strategy in the cloud.
• Build and foster a healthy team culture; one that emphasizes collaboration and innovation.
• Recruit for and develop the skills and competencies of the team; including building the technical and behavioral competencies needed to support our overall technology strategy; establish a robust cloud training program.
• Builds and maintains strong relationships across the business and technical organizations across WRBC.
• Partner with WRBC business leaders and organizational stakeholders to make sound investment decisions regarding cloud technology and their readiness to adopt it.
• Be visible and inspire others to engage with and follow WRBC’s cloud and technical strategies.

Patterns and Standards Development

• Identify pattern and standard gaps for cloud development and/or administrative services and determine potential options to address.
• Research, develop, and drive the adoption of cloud-based design patterns and standards, including high availability, load balancing, auto-scaling, and disaster recovery.
• Perform cloud-based technology and tool evaluations, including proof-of-concept and feasibility analysis.

Solutions Development

• Facilitate innovation by leading cloud-based projects for the enterprise; including migrations from on-premises, CICD pipelines, rehydration practices, managing containers, cloud security, and elastic computing.
• Work with development teams on building technical solutions that leverage established patterns for the cloud and follow architecture strategies and guidelines.
• Establish cost containment practices that provide robust controls and effectively balance developer productivity with managing consumption-based cost challenges.
• Evolve cloud solutions to a self-service deployment model.
• Rationalize technology and tool recommendations.
• Integrate solutions into the larger technical ecosystem to maximize impact and value.

Community of Practice

• Contribute to the internal cloud and architecture communities by participating in online forums, developing standards and patterns, and documenting solutions designs, which are shared across the community.
• Develop strong relationships with other business and technical teams and mentor less experienced developers and/or engineers in the development of their cloud skills.

• Bachelor’s degree from four-year college or university in computer science, engineering, business, or other related field or equivalent work experience.
• 8+ years progressive engineering experience developing/engineering solutions and leading multiple large-scale cross-domain engineering initiatives.
• 6+ years hands-on experience in multiple technical domains (application development, data, cloud, infrastructure, security) leading software development and/or administrative initiatives.
• 5+ years building public cloud platforms and architectures (Azure, AWS, GCP), including environment creation, inter-environment communication/networking, load balancing, elastic computing, multi-region/multi-AZ structures, security, and billing.
• 5+ years hands-on experience with DevOps/DevSecOps services and practices, including CICD pipelines, blue-green deployments, canary testing, code scanning, regression suite enablement, and infrastructure as code (IaC)
• 5+ years management experience – managing both associates and contractors in a technical area.
• 5+ years vendor management experience, including expectation setting, basic contract negotiation, communication, and proof-of-concept building.
• 2+ years hands-on experience with microservices and containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, ECS, EKS, AKS, etc.).
• Extensive knowledge of both native and third-party cloud tools for development, administration, and management of cloud applications and services.
• Ability to organize and prioritize workloads to focus on delivery of solutions across a variety of stakeholders.
• Ability to thrive and produce results with little or no supervision in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial environment.
• Exceptional soft and interpersonal skills, including teamwork, facilitation and negotiation.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills with ability to interact seamlessly at all levels with both technical and business stakeholders.
• Strong customer service focus and sense of urgency.
• Superior problem solving and analytical skills.
• Ability to quickly adapt and learn modern technologies and systems.
• Ability to balance the long-term (“big picture”) and short-term implications of individual decisions and organization goals.

Preferred

• 3+ years using Agile development methodologies.
• 3+ years hands-on experience using object-oriented design, decoupled architecture, middleware, messaging, API development, and monitoring tools.
• 3+ years hands-on experience using IAM, certificate, token/key generation and management, secure parameters, and code scanning tools within cloud applications and platforms.
• 2+ years managing a DevOps or Cloud Services team.
• 2+ years cloud networking experience.
• 1+ years working as a Cloud or Enterprise Architect.
• Experience with SOC 2, Type II certification in a public cloud environment.
• Ability to operate as a hands-on programmer, administrator, and engineer.
• Work history in the financial services or insurance industries.